Abortion

Long before the pill or legal abortion was available Marie Stopes tried to educate lower class women about birth control and sexual hygiene and was jailed for it. I remember one Catholic bishop being quoted as saying (I will never find the ref) "if women are given such information men will never know who their children belong to..." ( as though these lower class women who were producing a baby every two years was capable of hunting down illicit love affairs or something equally as silly). As a consequence many illegal abortions were carried out and many deaths ensued. Forbidding abortion has never stopped the wealthy from having access to it, nor has it stopped the poor from procuring it.

If a woman has become pregnant as a result of rape, or if the pregnancy endangers her life or mental health, or if she is mentally retarded so as to be incapable of raising the child, or if the foetus is diagnosed as having no viability as a fully functioning human being, or if the pregnancy is a result of incest, or if the woman is not yet a woman but a child in the eyes of the law, these are now considered to be reasons for medically induced abortion. Here the problem begins. The Vatican solves it by saying there are absolutely no grounds for abortion and that all these women will go through their pregnancy and give birth. In fact, the Vatican goes further and states that if the birth endangers the life of the mother, all efforts will go to save the life of the child. (Hence, before I was twelve years of age, I knew personally two women who had died as a result of this religious interference in secular and sexual matters. One woman left five children, and the other left nine. I may have known another but I could never find out the truth and anyway the newborn was buried with her.)

At the same time New Zealand (pre-pill and pre-legal abortion - I can only write about the country I know about) had four religious charitable organisations set up in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin, where 'unmarried mothers' went to have their babies. These organisations could take up to 14 of these women at a time and were full for the 1950s and 1960s. (Do the maths.) The unmarried mothers were usually aged between 12 and 17. The newborn was taken from the mother at birth - although I know one woman who was forced to breastfeed her child for two weeks. By the mid-1970s so many of these 'adopted' children were appearing before the courts in such numbers and in such various stages of mental and physical disintegration that even the judges were aware of a huge social problem. It was deemed a child was better off with its blood mother and so legislation was passed to introduce a benefit which would enable the mother to keep the child. Another social problem ensued when women chose the 'unmarried mother' status as a career choice. DNA testing opened the way to identify the father of the child and to make him pay rather than the taxpayer. This has brought a new sense of responsibility to the male who is now not told to 'sow his wild oats' and that 'boys will be boys' but rather to 'be careful' and although he is still not being careful enough I am optimistic that this will happen.

Herrnstein and Murray (The Bell Curve 1994) state unequivocably that 'white illegitimacy is an overwhelmingly lower class phenomenon' (p. 521). (Herrnstein and Murray did not even touch on the illegitimacy rate in other races because of cultural relativism.) While it has been useful to have such cannon fodder available in previous centuries this is now not the case. Here are some facts from The Bell Curve relating to the increase in population from the segment considered least desirable to breed excessively:

Working class parents are:
*Most concerned about respectability
*Punish more impulsively
*Punish when parents need the relief, not when it is more likely to do the child most good
*Have low education, are more authoritarian and rigid
*Have low levels of reasoning complexity
*Have vague and limited ideas about what children need emotionally and physically
*Are seldom able to see things from the point of view of others
*Cannot take children's need into consideration
*Cannot apply good judgement
*Are incompetent as parents

The problem: Does society press upon these people and make abortion a more favourable option than more and yet more children? Or does society ban abortion and bear the cost of a population explosion in the most unwanted - the results of incest, motherhood in the very young, the mentally retarded? Banning abortion will not affect the more intelligent and better off. There will not be a population explosion among these people.

If it seems I am making a case for eugenics, the case has already been made by in vitro and DNA scientists. My support for legal abortion comes not from religious, nor from idealogical beliefs, but from the misery I have seen caused by human fallibility. If a woman chooses to have an abortion, it should be her choice.